Since the early 1980’s, the 51 year old Scottish musician/writer/provocateur Nicholas Currie, better known as Momus, has been releasing music (his latest album, Hypnoprism, was his 18th) to varying levels of critical and commercial success. Since the 1990’s, he has been blogging in various forms, most notably on his old LiveJournal called Click Opera, which Warren Ellis called “probably the best-written blog on the Anglophone web” and of which novelist Dennis Cooper said, “It doesn’t get any better than Click Opera.”

“After years of finding children’s books tucked away in authors’ bibliographies (Graham Greene wrote children’s books!), followed by quick disappointment (how can they be out of print?), I realized that I was having this same frustrating revelation over and over. And when I would bring these discoveries up with my friends, they would have the same reaction (John Updike wrote children’s books!

“There can be no argument that the blog format gives ‘now’ the pride of place; novelty leads, and the past recedes into a string of ‘older posts’ links and archives pages. But it is a mistake to think that blogs therefore discard the past…

“It’s reasonable to suspect that a medium organized by reverse chronology may not be the place to turn for the virtues of the timeless.

“We talk too much about television as an antecedent to the Web, and not enough about the telephone… In America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, the sociologist Claude S. Fischer argues that our customary mode of discussing new technologies leads us astray by casting the technology as the protagonist and the human user as a victim.

Greetings, world. Blogging will be light today. Your humble Sunday editor is in Monterey celebrating the life of a friend who recently passed. But to keep you with stuff to look at until tomorrow, here’s a brief roundup of some of links from the book blogs from this past week.

Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who has written a fascinating history of blogging (in time, we’ll be interviewing him about his book), recently wrote up his thoughts on Twitter in two posts: how Twitter differs from blogging, how it has changed blogging, and where he sees the platform going from here.

A new novel by Kate Walbert chronicles five generations of women’s struggles, from suffrage to the War on Terror.

Last month’s North Beach Poetry Festival, William Taylor, Jr., poet, author of Words For Songs Never Written, and gentleman, has provided a very succinct report of the festival’s events which, incidentally did not appear to include much in the way of poetry.

Sometimes, the book blogs seem resigned to the idea that we’re entering some terrible dystopia, shaking their heads sadly as the businesspeople in charge douse the future in gasoline and dance around with a matchbook in their mouths. No longer. Today, the book blogs are accepting the future and figuring out what to do about it.

Good news! Your humble Rumpus Sunday editor, who was locked inside the Public Storage in North Berkeley for the better part of last night while helping his nine-months-pregnant friend move, has been rescued by the cops! And today, I’m excited about life and the book blogs because I’m free, so free, and because this week, the book blogs are a little bit brilliant.

The book blogs are in a tizzy! One second, it doesn’t look good for literature. The cancer has spread. The postmortem is imminent. But then all of the sudden they are saying everything is fine and pointing us in the direction of some really cool stuff, like kids who read and write and stories embedded in web sites!

The new “ladyblog” Double X, an offshoot of the online magazine Slate, just launched in Beta, with former Jezebel editor Jessica Grose one of the women at the helm. Oddly enough, one of the first entries is a piece called “How Jezebel is hurting women.”

Author Linda Hirshman argues that while the Jezebel writers look “a lot like the natural heirs of feminism,” and “are clearly familiar with the rhetoric of feminism,” the behavior they chronicle in their posts is dangerous to the movement, and the message:

Hello

Welcome to TheRumpus.net. We don’t say that lightly—we’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, advice, music, film and poetry—along with some kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you, as readers, commenters or future contributors, to do the same. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate and true (and sometimes very, very funny).(more)